So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (30)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

“You imagined yourself into your future”

I haven’t forgotten that the over-arching question here is, “What is the meaning of life?” Although it may seem as if this is merely of personal interest, I suggest that it applies to us all, at one level or another. Exposing my own shortcomings may be a way to make real what otherwise might remain only abstraction. Consider it my gift to you. This particular entry was written while I was visiting England, having just bought and read Michael Reynolds’ The Young Hemingway, which detailed how extensively Hemingway made up his past as he went along.

July 30, 2007

All right. My thoughts on Hemingway.

You were not particularly opposed to deceit, papa, and to making up your past as you went along. Didn’t that leave you frightfully insecure?

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (30)

Jung: “We must begin to learn about man”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

It is precisely my objection to politics and ideology, that they encourage people to look outside themselves for the source of life’s problems. But, as Jung in his wisdom told this reporter, each of us has within us Mr. Hyde. Our job is to learn what we are

From an interview with the English journalist Frederick Sands in 1955.

“It seems to me we have reached the limit of our evolution — the point from which we can advance no further. Man started from an unconscious state and has ever striven for greater consciousness. The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of mankind. Each new discovery leads to greater consciousness, and the path along which we are going is merely an extension of it. This inevitably calls for greater responsibility and enforces a great change in ourselves. We must draw conclusions from what we know and discover, and not take everything for granted.

“Man has come to be man’s worst enemy. It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient God could. We must begin to learn about man until every Jekyll can see his Hyde.”

So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (29)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

“Look not to political or economic remedies for your salvation!”

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Michael Langevin and others asked if I had ever asked you to follow-up on the question of societies that had prevented hypertrophy of wealth.

All right, we will proceed to a few words on other social organizations. But you may find this less helpful than you may expect — for our priority is not that you change your societies, but that you change your being. Lay down certain threads of your being, and pick up others, and in effect you will be born again, and new people will call forth a new society as a sort of side effect. To try to change society first is an error of materialist thinking. Changing individuals and changing the society around them is a reciprocal process of continual readjustment, not a one way or straight line process. Nature works only in spirals, not in straight lines. How else could it be, given the influences on earth?

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (29)

Jung — “Antithetical values nevertheless have their rights”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Read this, perhaps, in light of the on-going political turmoil that has led to discussion of the possibility of the coming of fascism. Carl Jung would say, that’s what happens when too many people lead an inauthentic life! At least, Carl Jung as brought through by me in an  altered state. As always, there can be no guarantees. The question is, does the material resonate?

This particular transmission ends pretty abruptly. Perhaps I lost the thread, or perhaps I lost the necessary energy to continue to follow the thought. The part that I did receive seems valuable enough to pass on.

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So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (28)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Why relying on guidance is practical — and how to do it

Saturday, April 7, 2007

8 a.m. My friends, what have you to say about my blog, or self development by choice, or past lives, or your ongoing project working through me, or the price of eggs?

The more pointed the question, remember, the more pointed the answer. However, we take your question to be in effect “what is the thing you would most likely to know and perhaps to communicate today?”

Close enough. And the answer is?

We realize that it seems irresponsible even to you for you to be blogging without consideration of how that is to translate into income for you. But the operative word, as you like to say, is “seems.”

What is practical and what is not depends upon many factors, most of them hidden from you most of the time. That is why it is practical to rely upon the guidance, once you have sorted out your issues around “is it me downstairs or is this guidance?”

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (28)

So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (27)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Learning to communicate

When we were babies, learning how to work the body machinery, one of the things we had to learn to do was to speak to the embodied presences around us. First came meaningless sounds, (and, sometimes, howls of frustration), then came baby talk, then came the ability to speak recognizable words and sentences and — in a word — communicate. As adults we rarely remember going through the process, but we all went through it.

What is easily forgotten is that besides learning to talk, we also had to learn to listen. That is, we had to learn to distinguish meaningful from meaningless sounds. We had to learn to recognize and categorize voice, tone, emotional nuance, etc. We learned to fill in the blanks when people used words we didn’t know, and often enough we heard correctly but misunderstood what we heard.

It was a lot to learn, but we learned it. Learning to communicate with the disembodied is much the same process. The major difference, as far as I can see, is that, learning it as adults, we typically don’t have as much confidence, or patience with our learning curve, as babies do.

Here’s an example of learning the process. Four years ago, my friend Hank Wesselman, knowing that I had contacted various historical personages, asked if I could ask Carl Jung about a specific letter from Max Zeller. The results of the experiment are instructive.

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (27)

“I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word.”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

It is no pleasant thing to spend an entire lifetime watching one’s beloved country descend into insanity, but this has been my fate, and of the fate of any who have come into consciousness within the past half century. I say “who have come into consciousness,” because it is not enough to live; it is necessary to understand what you are living, if only after the fact.

So many people around me are giving in to fear — nameless fear, formless fear, often enough the product of mistaking television for reality. Many others continue to believe in political or ideological panaceas that are, and must be, nothing but illusion.

Obviously these two phenomena are connected, and connected in an unsuspected way — they stem from the loss of meaning which in turn stems from loss of sure spiritual connection. For 150 years at least, and gathering momentum as it proceeds, the descent of our culture into materialist superstition has cut cord after cord that used to tie us to sanity. So now we are in the position of being spiritually rootless, incapable of perceiving what is reality and what is illusion, fearing shadows and continually sowing the dragon’s teeth that spring up as armed men, and wondering why we have no peace.

Why is it that people will follow every sort of leader but the ones who offer wisdom? The following quotations are from an interview that Carl Jung gave in April, 1934. He could be talking about us today:

Continue reading “I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word.”